(CBS/AP) The cleanup of miles of New Jersey shorefront ripped apart by Superstorm Sandy has just begun, but New York City moved closer to resuming its normal frenetic pace Thursday by getting back its vital subways.

The storm-crippled trains began rolling uptown from Penn Station shortly after 6 a.m. Technology worker Ronnie Abraham was on one of them, hoping to get home to Harlem.

"It's the lifeline of the city," Abraham said as he boarded. "It can't get much better than this."

New Yorkers began lining up at subway stops by 5 a.m. Thursday, an hour before the subways were to resume limited service. The predawn commuters waiting at platforms included construction workers, shop owners and executives.

The decision to reopen undamaged parts of the nation's largest transit system came as the region struggled to find its way back from a storm that killed more than 70 people and left more than 5 million without power.

Two of the region's main airports opened Wednesday and officials promised that the third, LaGuardia Airport, would return to service Thursday. Actors and eager audiences brought darkened Broadway theaters back to life. And New Yorkers packed on to buses that returned for the first time to city streets since the storm, joining a throng of gridlocked traffic that navigated the city without working stop lights.

Across the region, people stricken by the storm pulled together, in some cases providing comfort to those left homeless, in others offering hot showers and electrical outlets for charging cellphones to those without power.

The spirit of can-do partnership extended even to politicians, who at least made the appearance of putting their differences aside to focus together on Sandy.

"We are here for you," President Obama said in Brigantine, N.J., touring a ravaged shore. "We are not going to tolerate red tape. We are not going to tolerate bureaucracy."

Mr. Obama joined Republican Gov. Chris Christie, who had been one of the most vocal supporters of Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, to tour the ravaged coast. But the two men spoke only of helping those harmed by the storm.

That was already beginning Wednesday, when masses of people walked shoulder-to-shoulder across the Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan for work, reversing the escape scenes from the Sept. 11 terror attack and the blackout of 2003. They reached an island, where many people took the lack of power and water and transportation as a personal challenge.

On Third Avenue, people gathered like refugees around a campfire. But instead of crackling flames, their warmth came from more advanced technology: a power strip that had been offered to charge cellphones.

At a fire hydrant on West 16th Street, 9-year-old Shiyin Ge and her brother, 12-year-old Shiyuan Ge, stood in line to fill up buckets of water. But unlike the adults, the two kids held plastic Halloween candy pails painted with grinning jack-o-lanterns.

"There's no water in our house," said Shiyin Ge, who had planned to dress up as a ladybug for Halloween.

After suffering the worst disaster in its 108-year-old history, the subways were to roll again — at least some of them. More than a dozen of the lines would offer some service, but none below Manhattan's 34th Street, a line of demarcation in the city separating the hardest-hit residents from those who escaped the brunt.

Downtown Manhattan, which includes the city's financial district, Sept. 11 memorial and other tourist sites, was still mostly an urban landscape of shuttered bodegas and boarded-up restaurants, where people roamed in search of food, power and a hot shower.

To get there from Brooklyn or Queens, commuters who would normally zoom beneath the East River in tunnels that flooded will have to take shuttle buses, adding to the enormous stress already being placed on gridlocked Manhattan streets.

"We are going to need some patience and tolerance," New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Wednesday.

The biggest challenge remains pumping floodwaters out of tunnels, and the U.S. military is helping.

"We're bringing pumps in now," Lt. Gen. Thomas Bostick, commander of the Army Corps of Engineers, told "CBS Evening News" anchor Scott Pelley. "They pump out about 28,000 gallons per minute. To put that in understandable terms, it'll empty a pool, an Olympic-size pool, in about 20 minutes. We're trying to figure out how many pools we have in New York City."

The airports and subways weren't the only transportation systems returning to the region. Suburban trains started running for the first time on Wednesday, and Amtrak's Northeast Corridor was to take commuters from city to city for on Friday for the first time since the storm.From West Virginia to the Jersey Shore, the storm's damage was still being felt, and seen.

In New Jersey, signs of the good life that had defined wealthy shorefront enclaves like Bayhead and Mantoloking lay scattered and broken: $3,000 barbecue grills buried beneath the sand and hot tubs cracked and filled with seawater. Nearly all the homes were seriously damaged, and many had entirely disappeared.

"This," said Harry Typaldos, who owns the Grenville Inn in Mantoloking, "I just can't comprehend."

Bob Davis, who rode out the storm in his home on Long Beach Island, told CBS News correspondent Chip Reid that in 40 years on the island he's never seen a storm with anything like this kind of power.

"We made it through, and it's just the cleanup now," said Davis. "But it's going to take, in my estimation, it's about two years to get the island back in shape."

Farther north in Hoboken, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, nearly 20,000 residents remained stranded in their homes, amid accusations that officials have been slow to deliver food and water. One man blew up an air mattress and floated to City Hall, demanding to know why supplies hadn't gotten out. At least one-fourth of the city's residents are flooded and 90 percent are without power.

The outages forced many gas stations across the state to close, resulting in long lines of people looking to fuel cars and backup generators. Darryl Jameson of Toms River waited more than hour to get fuel.

"The messed up part is these people who are blocking the roadway as they try to cut in line," he said. "No one likes waiting, man, but it's something you have to do."

On New York's Long Island, bulldozers scooped sand off streets and tow trucks hauled away destroyed cars, while residents tried to find a way to their homes to restart their lives. Joanne and Richard Kalb used a rowboat to reach their home in Mastic Beach, filled with 3 feet of water.

Her husband, exasperated by the futility of their effort, posted a sign on a telephone pole, asking drivers to slow down: "Slow please no wake."

Snow drifts as high as 5 feet piled up in West Virginia, where the former Hurricane Sandy merged with two winter weather systems as it went inland. Heavy snow collapsed parts of an apartment complex, a grocery store, a hardwood plant and three homes. The sixth person killed in the state was a candidate for the state House of Delegates, John Rose Sr., who was struck by a falling tree limb. His name will remain on the ballot on Election Day.

A few more inches might fall in West Virginia, but meteorologists said Sandy's days are numbered. The National Weather Service said Wednesday that the last remnants of the storm are in the Appalachian Mountains, and will be gone by the end of the week.

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